After Divorce, Floating Another Chance at Love

When I was 45 and recently separated from my husband, I fell in love with a man who lived on a boat. It was not a sailboat or a houseboat. It was a motorized cruiser with a small kitchen, a table and couch, a top deck, and a large semicircular bed nestled in the bow. In that bed, I could lie in any direction, at any angle, like the needle of a compass or the hand of a clock.

Everything about this man’s past—his time in juvenile hall, his lack of a formal education, his vast and varied sexual experience—differed from mine. Yet everything about this man as he stood before me on any given morning or afternoon or night felt familiar and perfect. I felt more at ease in his presence than I had in years. Perhaps my entire life.

At the time I was writing a novel about love. Or rather, I had written two novels about love, both of which were rejected by my editor. More emotional plotting, she told me. More character development. More—something. The story was inspired by the life and death of my uncle. It was about the failure of love to offer salvation. It was about the ways we show love and how those demonstrations can be sublime and beautiful but also fundamentally inadequate. It was about how we cannot save each other. We can save only ourselves.

The first draft of this book I wrote after the birth of my third child, when I believed my marriage to be worth saving. The second draft of the book I wrote while my marriage was undeniably falling apart. I would escape to my writing studio to drink wine, cry, and type. That novel became one not about love but about my anger and frustration. It grew bloated: 100,000 words, 140,000. When I submitted the manuscript to my editor, the act felt more like a surrender than a completion. I could not write another draft, I believed. Perhaps, I thought after telling my husband I wanted a divorce, I would never write another word.

As the separation took shape, as we told our children and friends, I put the book away. I couldn’t bear to think about it. The inadequacies of love. I felt like all the things that had once seemed certain—my marriage, my love for my husband, my ability to write—had deserted me. I could rely on nothing and no one and this idea brought me to the brink of despair.

Enter the man on the boat. He arrived as most things do these days: via the Internet. I had missed out on online dating. The last time I’d been single, I would gather up my female friends and go to a party or a bar to meet men. Now, I could do it in my pajamas, sitting at my kitchen table. It wasn’t that I wanted a new relationship. Far from it. I went online purely for sex. “Cleansing sex!” a recently divorced friend told me while pushing a handful of condoms into my purse. “You need to wash your husband from your body. You need to wash him off and then move on. Or, just have some fun.”

Online dating did indeed seem like a game. These were not real men with real desires. There was SeattleMan23 who liked Hüsker Dü and humus. There was MassageMePlease who wanted only to come to my house and perform a “nonsexual massage” with or without oil (my choice). Over the course of two weeks, I went on dates with 10 different men, a gauntlet I ran with the same sense of discipline and perseverance with which I had trained for my first marathon: It was something I had to do, regardless of enjoyment or pain, reason or foolishness.

The boat man’s online name was EpoxyMe2U. His real name was Christopher. On our first date, we drank three Manhattans each and made out inside my minivan until the windows fogged and I said the babysitter needed to go home. He had tattoos and large muscles and stories about his eight siblings, his engineer father, his political activist mother, his four grown children, his first wife. He was a carpenter who played the violin and cooked a mean fish taco. He liked Pink Martini and Noam Chomsky. His smile transformed his face—which was forbidding and tough, a fighter’s face—into something altogether different. Did I fall for him that night? No. Almost.

In the months before I met Christopher, I had started to write the third version of my novel about love. The new book took shape slowly at first, then all in a rush, much like falling in love itself. Sometimes I wrote at my kitchen table, sometimes in a coffee shop, and sometimes I wrote on Christopher’s boat. It was moored at the end of a long dock in a busy marina with views of rocks bristling with cormorants, seagulls screeching overhead, and a bevy of ducks that arrived each morning for their share of the toast.

A house is a place of many different moods, with superfluous corners, places to hide, closed doors. But a boat offers condensed space, a sense of completeness and ease. Everything sits close at hand. The essential items of life, I realized, were few: two plates, two cups, a frying pan, a coffee pot. The boat offered me an escape from the overwhelming uncertainties of my life on land. This was a place away from children, dirty dishes, bills to pay, decisions to make about finances and mortgages and custody schedules. Sitting with my laptop at the table on Christopher’s boat, the words of my novel flowed.

As the final book took shape, my divorce worsened. My husband became increasingly angry. He wanted more and more from me. He wanted the house and more time with our children. He wanted the wedding china and a photograph taken by my uncle and the royalties from my new book. He changed lawyers, from one trained in collaborative divorce to a litigator. We had been married for 12 years, together for 15, and the kind, generous, mild-mannered man I knew became a stranger.

But did it matter? I was living in a place without anger or demands. I had no need for wedding china. I was free. I was floating. For hours after disembarking the boat, the earth would seem to buckle and tilt as though water still moved beneath my feet.

For a third time, I submitted the book to my editor, hoping for the best, expecting the worst. I waited for two weeks, then three. When my editor called, it was early morning in Seattle. I was driving home from Christopher’s boat. I let the call go to voicemail and then I pulled the car to the side of the road. I watched a sailboat shift and slide across a dawn-lit Puget Sound and I listened to my editor’s message. It’s everything I’d hoped for, she said. You kept the best of what came before, but everything is different.

Ten months had passed since that first date with Christopher. Fifteen since the day I separated from my husband. Nearly five years since I’d started writing a book about love and why we cannot save each other.

With all escapes, there comes a moment when you realize the price you have paid for your freedom. When was mine? Perhaps the day my husband said he wanted to destroy me. That he hated me. That he’d rather raise our children with an au pair than with me. Perhaps the day I realized that my escape had become a surrender. I first came to Christopher’s boat to find freedom, to write, to fall in love, but instead I was hiding there.

On Thanksgiving Day, I told Christopher I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t be with him because my children needed me more and the conflict—the never-ending, relentless conflict coming from the father of those children—left no room for love. I was fighting. I had to fight. I could not do both. It was the lesson of the book that Christopher had helped me to write, the lesson that I found within the shifting landscapes of his boat. Love provides, love supports, but it is not a safe harbor. It shakes, it heaves, and sometimes it pulls away. We must learn to stand with or without it. Saving is done day by day, step by step, word by word, whether on ocean or dry land, and the real saving—the kind that always endures—we must do for ourselves.

That winter, the divorce grew more bitter, more angry, and then, nine months later, it was done. By that time, my children were accustomed to the routine of changing houses. In each, our daughter has a fuzzy beanbag chair, our middle son maintains towering decks of Magic: The Gathering playing cards, and our youngest keeps plastic crates full of Lego. Soon my novel went to copy edits, the cover design was finalized. After five years, the book that saw the end of my marriage would finally be published.

And so one morning after getting my kids off to school, I sat down to write something new. This, too, was about love. An email. It began: Dear Christopher.

Tara Conklin’s novel,The Last Romantics, was published by Harper Collins on February 5, 2019.

Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day until Valentine’s Day.

? 2019 ? Condé Nast. All rights reserved.Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 5/25/18) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 5/25/18). ?Your California Privacy Rights ? The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. ?Ad Choices ? CN Fashion & BeautyVogue may earn compensation on sales through affiliate programs.